Think Tank: The ‘free’ university costs us all

Plummeting funding and increasing state control is not healthy, warns Gerard Casey

Universities have always had a relationship with the state and have, to some extent, always been under its control. What is new about most contemporary universities is their almost-total reliance on state funding.

He who pays the piper calls the tune and, increasingly, the state has been telling the universities what tune to play.

However, there is no absolute necessity for universities to be state-funded. They operated without such funding for most of their history and they can do so again.

We can have no state funding and no state control, or state funding and state control, or declining and inadequate state funding and increasing state control. The latter is the least satisfactory option but the one that we increasingly have as the state appears unwilling to relinquish the control it has acquired over the years, even though its funding has declined over the same period.